REVISIONS

REVISIONS; When Art Digests Life and Disgorges Its Poison

By Margo Jefferson

Published: February 21, 2000

I watched the 1998 documentary ''The Brandon Teena Story'' and the 1999 feature film ''Boys Don't Cry,'' based on the same events, in one day. In fact, I watched them within an hour of each other, which was harrowing. Of course there was the story. Teena Brandon, free, white and 21, wanted to be free of her female identity. So she left it behind in Lincoln, Neb., and rode into Falls City, Neb., as a man named Brandon. There she won the prettiest girl and hung out with the toughest guys until her past caught up with her, for which she paid by being raped and then, once she brought charges against those same tough guys, killed.

But I was also struck, no stricken, by what these two films leave one thinking about that old matter of life versus art. It's partly the question of what art must do with ''the bloody sprawling mess'' (Katherine Anne Porter's words) to make us find something redemptive in it. It's also about how life competes with art voraciously, daring it to include all those trashy coincidences and narrative pileups, all the personality twisters we encounter every day.

And these questions do not come up just when a wrenching life is made into a wrenching work of art like Kimberly Peirce's ''Boys Don't Cry.'' Look at how people throw themselves into the talk soup of daytime television shows, performing their lives with histrionic gusto or audition for serials like MTV's ''Real Life,'' in which they can play themselves weekly with the naturalism so characteristic of American acting. Why shouldn't they be rewarded for playing the selves they're stuck with, since they are not going to be rewarded for playing anyone else?

This conundrum makes it extremely unsettling to watch the ''real life'' people play themselves in Susan Muska's and Greta Olafsdottir's spare, mournful documentary, and then to see actors play them yet again. Ms. Peirce's cast is brilliant without ever resorting to imitation, but the people playing themselves are utterly compelling, too. If they were actors they would be getting high praise and possibly award nominations.

The documentary can show us only photographs of Brandon and play a brief recording of her flat alto voice, made the night a Falls City sheriff grilled her with deliberate coarseness about the rape. But there in living, apparently unrepentant color are John Lotter and Thomas Nissen, who raped and killed her. Boys one wants to call them, with those lethal juvenile-delinquent manners we've seen on thousands of movie and television screens: the cocky forthrightness followed by sullen blankness; the admission of guilt delivered with a ''Hey man, stuff happens'' shrug or half-smile. There is Lana Tisdel too, the snappy, karaoke-singing long-haired blonde with the red fingernails who enraged Thomas and John by continuing to date Brandon even after being told he was a woman.

What a chasm there is between the waste and horror of the lives we see here and the triumph of the art and the artists. Don't misunderstand me: ''Boys Don't Cry'' is exactly the kind of art we need, for it pulls viewers (with such visual and emotional care) into worlds and lives they might otherwise neither know nor want to know. But a critic's usual words, like ''astonishing,'' ''beautifully crafted'' and ''powerful,'' feel wrong here. ''Boys Don't Cry'' is not only art; it is art so shadowed by life that I am tempted to call it an artistic hermaphrodite. I'd like to see movie theaters show the documentary and the feature side by side. Each is complete, but together they are a revelation.

Hilary Swank does look very much like the dead man-woman. How beautifully she captures everything you see in the photographs: the sweet but also triumphant smile (''I'm getting away with it!''), the proudly worn cowboy hat, the eagerness to charm and please.

Her re-creation feels like a raising from the dead. But it wouldn't be so astonishing if she didn't also remind us that every boy has to practice being a boy. Getting the walk, the shoulders, the handshake right; asking a girl to dance or roller skate without looking like a dork; impressing the guys without alienating the girls. And finally the thrill of getting it right, having that power. I'd never understood this so clearly until I saw a woman lay claim to it all.

Still, the documentary reveals things that the feature excludes for the sake of dramatic intensity, or minimizes (for the sake of audience sympathy?). We see only Brandon's affair with Lana in ''Boys Don't Cry,'' while quite a few ex-girlfriends from his hometown appear in the documentary. Ms. Swank exudes androgynous sexuality. Clearly so did Brandon. He knew what girls wanted, his ex's keep saying. He was courteous and a good kisser, too. ''It was really nice being treated like a lady instead of like dirt,'' Ms. Tisdel recalls. Too many women savored Brandon's manly behavior to want to admit that he was a woman.

Brandon also had the profile of a male delinquent: wanted for auto theft and known for petty larceny and check forging. Brandon was a beguiling con artist, stealing from friends to buy friends gifts. (One girlfriend received an engagement ring bought on her own stolen credit card.) ''Boys Don't Cry'' could have shown this more clearly. Why not? Maybe the sympathies of some viewers would have waned, but Ms. Peirce and her co-writer, Andy Bienen, would have intensified the masquerade and the shock of its end.

For what the movie makes implacably real is the fury the men feel at being fooled. They don't just rape Brandon because of the sex with Lana; they rape because they were tricked.

What a strong, gifted director Ms. Peirce is. And apart from Ms. Swank there is Chloe Sevigny as Lana, so truculent and distant, then so full of quicksilver excitement. And, so chillingly, there are Peter Sarsgaard and Brendan Sexton III as the murdering pair. You do not feel as if you are watching actors play parts. You feel you are watching them using their own bodies to house other people's souls.

Photos: Teena Brandon, left, the subject of the film ''Boys Don't Cry,'' in which she is played by Hilary Swank. (Bill Matlock/Fox Searchlight)